By Samantha Magick
A multimillion-dollar program aimed at supporting “a more prosperous Pacific driven by a skilled, competitive and productive workforce” is undergoing controversial changes which could have significant impacts on the future of vocational training in the Pacific Island region.
The new leadership at the Australia Pacific Training Coalition (APTC) says it’s a necessary response to the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impacts. But there’s concern amongst some stakeholders that the process has been opaque, as it is based on a strategic review and rapid assessment that few people have seen, and that it marks a shift away from meaningful Pacific Islands nations’ input into the Coalition’s work.
APTC was established in 2007 as the Australia-Pacific Technical College, and began work a year later. Over that period, the Australian government has invested more than A$350 million (US$271 million) in the effort. Corporate materials state that it has supported 16,000 graduates across 14 Pacific countries, working with TVET (Technical and Vocational Educational and Training) institutions in Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, and offering Australian-recognised qualifications and other training. It has since transitioned to become the Australia Pacific Training Coalition.
APTC is managed by TAFE Queensland, specifically TAFE Queensland International Education (TQIE), a company limited by shares that was established in July 2017. TAFE Queensland’s 2019-20 annual report states that TQIE’s primary source of revenue is from the APTC contract. In 2019-20 TQIE recognised revenues totalling A$5.91 million (US$4.57 million).
COVID response
APTC is now in its third stage which runs until 2026. The design document for this stage—which was written before the coronavirus outbreak— states that it will take an “increasingly catalytic role. It will evolve from an Australian college directly delivering Australian qualifications to an enabling organisation that assists Pacific partners to provide their own internationally recognised training and achieve quality improvements in their institutions and systems. It will forge enduring pathways between skills development and employment in both national and international labour markets.”
The document continues: “A transformed APTC, with a primarily national workforce working in politically smart ways, will be agile, responsive and entrepreneurial. It will build coalitions with likeminded reform champions including peak industry bodies, the private sector and training institutions to advance locally-led TVET reform. It will foster greater coordination, collaboration and harmonisation of Australian support. By 2028, the APTC will be recognised regionally and globally as a leading force in skills creation carefully linked to skills mobility and as a highly successful example of sustainable international development.”
COVID has changed that, indicates APTC’s new Interim CEO. Janelle Chapman says while stage two of the program was “very much about the partnerships, coalitions and building that up… the priority has swung back to the TVET delivery, so there are skills for employment.”
“It’s a refocusing on what we do” says Chapman, who was about to be confirmed in the substantive position of Executive Director APTC as we prepared to go to print. “Because of COVID, DFAT has said it needs to swing back to skills for employment for now. It’s not to say we’re not still talking about Pacific-led long term. That’s still on the table and always will be, but the focus needs to be on getting people jobs at the moment.”
The COVID response saw APTC offer micro-credentials in digital literacy for tourism workers who had lost their jobs. APTC also worked with partners in Vanuatu, including Wan Smolbag Theatre, to deliver a work-ready skills program on radio. This project is to be replicated in other Pacific Island countries. APTC also ran training on COVID-safe business guidelines, plus online training on business resilience skills and microenterprise training.
Fantasha Lockington is the CEO of the Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association and an APTC board member. She says the training offered to tourism workers post-COVID was developed in close consultation with the industry and was “just awesome”.
“One of the initial ones was how to use the Internet of Things (IoT); how do we fill forms online, how do we promote ourselves; how do we join groups, how do we find out what else is going on.” Lockington says financial literacy training was another useful offering in the early days of the pandemic.
Measuring success
The changes at APTC come amid criticism from some quarters that its graduates are struggling to find work, and that the Coalition is not meeting its objectives, specifically around labour mobility.
Speaking at a recent Development Policy Institute webinar, academic and researcher Dr Richard Curtain said APTC is clearly seen as a success: “graduates are highly thought of by employers and Pacific governments, who see the APTC as having played a significant role in lifting the standards of technical trainers in the Pacific more generally”.
However, looking at data relating only to job seekers (i.e., those who did not have a job to return to after graduation), Curtain and fellow analyst and Institute Director, Dr Stephen Howes say APTC’s tracing surveys (which run six and 12 months after graduation) show that the proportion of graduates with full-time work at the time of the survey has fallen from 77% in 2011-13 to 55% in 2017-19. They say the proportion of graduates with no paid work over the same period had climbed from 9% to 35%, and that Pacific labour markets cannot “absorb a continuous flow of post-school technical graduates with the same qualifications.”
The Development Policy Institute (which is based at the Australian National University) has consistently championed labour mobility as a critical source of Pacific employment and income. Curtain and Howes write: “The best way to promote demand for APTC graduates is to link them with New Zealand and Australian employers. Although the APTC was established in response to Pacific demands for greater access to Australian labour markets, opportunities for migration by APTC graduates have been very limited.”
They suggest some possible pathways to improve labour mobility, in particular the Temporary Skills Shortage visa (TSS). Only a tiny fraction of these visas has gone to Pacific Islanders despite the skills of APTC graduates being a good fit they say. 66% of TSS migrants are hired within Australia, and when employers go offshore to recruit, they go to bigger, and tried and tested markets such as the Philippines. Curtain and Howes suggest employers be subsidised to visit the APTC, see the skill level and recruit from the student cohorts. They say visa applicants could be assisted to “undertake the technical assessment interviews they need to obtain a visa. APTC could also subsidise visa expenses, prepare graduates for the language test as required, and help with individual visa submissions by employees.”
Some of this is not without precedent. In recent years, APTC aged care graduates have gone to work in Australia after employers visited the Pacific and conducted interviews with candidates at APTC’s office.
Janelle Chapman says APTC will run a new tracer survey next year, which will provide more clarity on employment trends, but as 2020 was extraordinary, it is hard to draw any long term conclusions. “The reality is, we didn’t get the employment outcomes we hoped to get, but then I don’t think anyone did through the COVID,” she says.
Chapman says while the APTC strategic review is not yet public—as DFAT has not done its management response—it prioritises TVET delivery, Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) and labour mobility. She says this doesn’t mean more Australian trainers will be flown in, but that “we’re looking at how we can build the capacity of individual national trainers to be more able to ensure that we have that longer term sustainability.”
“Labour mobility has become a big focus for DFAT post strategic review, and they want us to look at other alternatives,” Chapman says.
“It might be that we [APTC] need someone regionally as well [on labour mobility], or we might need someone based in Queensland or based in New Zealand, or we work with partners in order to ensure that we’ve got the information and logistics right.”
She cites opportunities in aged care, and Australia’s tourism sector as one potential source of work opportunities for Pacific graduates, and says they are taking to (Australian company) Australian Internships about this pathway, and possible 9-12-month internships with Australian tourism operators, who are struggling to fill positions now that international students and working holiday makers visa holders’ numbers are dramatically down. Chapman says the beauty of this scheme is that there is a robust pastoral care framework around the students, and tourism workers who are currently out of a job in the Pacific would earn income and “currency in the industry, with the ability to be able to come back when hopefully borders are well and truly opened, because they are not going to get that experience here at this point in time.”
“COVID has made all of us have to think outside the square,” she says. “What may have been a very simple or the normal pathway may have changed now, because of quarantine issues at both ends, because of COVID itself not allowing ease of travel, but there are certain opportunities.”
The end of a Pacific-led APTC?
APTC’s last publicly available Annual Report (2019) emphasised the Coalition’s “deep knowledge and understanding of the Pacific context” in “working with partners to address the complex challenges associated with TVET systems strengthening.” APTC’s senior Pacific development specialists and its Country Directors have been central to this.
Speaking at her farewell in January this year, outgoing APTC CEO Soli Middleby talked of her pride as an Australian taxpayer in the “value for money we have achieved in all we do.”
She spoke of her initial reservations about the changes from training college to coalition, before coming to the position that “a coalition that would work with like-minded champions across the region to build a stronger, better financed and higher quality TVET sector, and most importantly that it would support Pacific led ideas to get that better sector.”
“Perhaps most of all I am proud of the way we have seen more Pacific Island staff take up the senior leadership roles at APTC and the work we have done to prioritise and support local leadership and expertise and of the emergence of Pacific leadership in the organisation,” she told staff and APTC partners. “When I started in April 2018, almost three years ago, APTC was almost entirely run by Australians, we had done a great job of nationalising our trainers but there were only a couple of Pacific Island managers – now the majority of our managers are Pacific Island citizens. This is very uncommon in aid programs management and something I am very proud to have contributed to.”
Some observers say the decision to make redundant five senior APTC managers, and the appointment of an Australian with no Papua New Guinea experience to head APTC’s large and complex PNG country office, is rolling back the localisation/regionalisation achievements Middleby cites. Four members of the leadership team who’ve been told “their positions are being considered for redundancy” are politically well-connected Pacific Islanders with strong development experience. The fifth is the organisation’s deputy CEO, who has deep Pacific experience at the Pacific Community amongst other organisations.
APTC staff have been told that the Coalition needed to realign its strategy to meet DFAT’s expectations, respond to COVID-19 impacts and improve in areas where expectations have not been met—essentially that DFAT was not happy with the Coalition’s performance. A rapid assessment was undertaken to look at each function in APTC and their performance. Like the strategic review, the results of that rapid assessment have not been made available to staff or stakeholders we spoke to.
However, Chapman says the changes are good business practice.
“If your strategic direction or your priorities all your focus changes, then you have to make sure that your structure is aligned to that, to be able to meet those that changes. It’s not unusual and certainly with COVID, most businesses have looked at their organisational structure because most businesses have had to pivot. So that’s unfortunately the reality of the situation because we have to make sure the functions align with what the outcomes need to be.”
Concerns have also been raised about the quality of consultations held with partner governments and institutions over the changes.
Meanwhile Board member Fantasha Lockington says consultations on the new direction need to continue.
“I think there still needs to be a whole lot of discussions happening at this level that need to filtered all the way down. The fact that it is already coming out a little bit negative probably needs to be looked at.
“They’re trying to manage it, so they’ve got new leadership, they’ve got a new structure that they are looking at but that hasn’t been confirmed, they’ve had a review and they’ve also got a new strategic plan going forward. It’s making sure that everything is aligned before they start dropping off people.
So, I don’t think it should be alarm bells yet, I think it’s a work in progress.”
Where to now?
Despite upheavals at APTC headquarters, the work continues. It’s graduation season and this month, 71 Samoans graduated in education support, fabrication, hospitality, leadership and management and International Skills Training. In Fiji, Education Minister Rosy Akbar told 321 local graduates: “You are what Fiji needs right now – your skills and talents are what will drive Fiji to ensure that we get through the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on our nation.” The 96 i-Kiribati nationals who graduated from APTC in Betio last month heard their Employment Minister Taabeta Teakai say “I am particularly encouraged by the qualifications awarded today, given their close alignment with our Government’s priorities for economic development.”
While the strategic review of APTC is so far unavailable, an earlier draft gave a positive assessment of APTC work. It suggested DFAT talk to partners about the possibility of APTC becoming an independent legal entity in the medium-term offering training, TVET sector strengthening and reform, with cofounding from Pacific Island countries. It also recommended APTC maintain a majority independent governing structure, with 50% Pacific Islander membership, and with the role of Chair co-shared by both an Australian and Pacific member of the board.
The APTC Phase Three design document also stated increased focus on supporting TVET systems strengthening and reform initiatives. This would involve “actively working to foster reform where opportunities exist or emerge,” noting that “it will be particularly important to ensure that any reform process is locally led. This is to avoid supporting processes that may represent technical best practice, but as externally driven policy and technical assistance either fails to find any traction with those key stakeholders, or creates the appearance of reform without making much of a difference in practice. Locally led development means that there is a focus on issues and problems that are of importance to local stakeholders. It also means that priority is given to local leadership and local capacity in the search for solutions and approaches to TVET reform.”
“The Pacific led approach is not off the table long term from either me in this chair or DFAT in Canberra,” Chapman says. “It’s just that it has to change at the moment because of the COVID response, otherwise we’re not going to be sustainable. And the priority at the moment is people getting jobs.”
There are bigger questions that remain for us unanswered. How much of the shift at APTC is a considered response to the economic difficulties Pacific Island economies now find themselves in, and how much is attributable to the protection of vested interests, as some have suggested? How can Pacific stakeholders ensure that COVID responses do not become rigid long term intractable arrangements, that develop without meaningful Pacific Island input or leadership? Why is sustainability and Pacific leadership mutually exclusive? And can we expect to see this sort of reprioritisation, and the strengthening of donor control over program execution, extend to other regional development programs?
